❝ …Government scientists didn’t know they were breathing in radioactive uranium at the time it was happening. In fact, most didn’t learn about their exposure for months, long after they returned home from the nuclear weapons research center where they had inhaled it.

The entire event was characterized by sloppiness, according to a quiet federal investigation, with multiple warnings issued and ignored in advance, and new episodes of contamination allowed to occur afterward. All of this transpired without public notice by the center.

❝ Here’s how it happened: In April and May 2014, an elite group of 97 nuclear researchers from as far away as the U.K. gathered in a remote corner of Nye County, Nev., at the historic site where the U.S. had exploded hundreds of its nuclear weapons. With nuclear bomb testing ended, the scientists were using a device they called Godiva at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center to test nuclear pulses on a smaller and supposedly safe scale.

But as the technicians prepared for their experiments that spring — under significant pressure to clear a major backlog of work and to operate the machine at what a report called Godiva’s “upper energy range” — they committed several grievous errors, according to government reports.

❝ The machine had been moved to Nevada nine years earlier from Los Alamos, N.M. But a shroud, descriptively called Top Hat, which should have covered the machine and prevented the escape of any loose radioactive particles, was not reinstalled when it was reassembled in 2012.

Also, because Godiva’s bursts tended to set off multiple radiation alarms in the center, the experimenters decided to switch the alarm system off. But because the alarms were connected to the ventilation and air filter system for the room, those were shut off as well. The only ventilation remaining was a small exhaust fan that vented into an adjacent anteroom where researchers gathered before and after experiments.

What could go wrong?

RTFA for the whole event. Read the whole article and realize this single example of careless handling, monitoring or dangerous materials isn’t rare. Sloppiness, an absence of concern for the safety of nuclear workers – from techs to supremos – is as bad as you might expect from agencies run by beancounters instead of folks concerned first and foremost with safety.

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“Lab might have known dangerous waste was unmarked” (8/4/17 Santa Fe New Mexican) http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/lab-might-have-known-dangerous-waste-was-unmarked/article_19d37b31-219a-5620-954c-a62fa9620d2a.html
“State inspectors and Los Alamos National Laboratory officials may have known about an unlabeled hazardous waste container two days before the material ignited at the lab’s plutonium facility during a cleanup operation, causing a worker to suffer second-degree burns.
The small but dangerous container was among a number of serious violations of the lab’s hazardous waste permit that state workers discovered during an April 17 inspection — problems that could cost the lab thousands of dollars in fines.
The lab failed to label the contents of various containers of potentially deadly waste, improperly left a waste container unsealed, failed to train a number of workers how to handle waste and did not maintain employee training records, according to a July 20 notice from the New Mexico Environment Department that was made public Friday.”